Mario Party

Mario Party is a party video game developed by Hudson Soft and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64, released in Japan in 1998 and in North America in 1999. It combines a virtual board game with a large collection of minigames: up to four players take turns moving around bright, themed boards collecting coins and stars, and at the end of each turn compete in a short minigame, usually one against three, two against two, or a free-for-all. The result is a chaotic, luck-and-skill mix designed entirely around local multiplayer and the social friction of friends turning on one another for a star. The first entry became notorious for a handful of minigames that required players to rotate the analog stick as fast as possible, which could injure the palm; Nintendo of America eventually offered protective gloves to players who wrote in, a detail that captures exactly how physically these games were played. It launched one of Nintendo's most prolific franchises, with numerous sequels across every later console. Built from the ground up for a room full of people rather than a solo player, it is a definitive summer-break machine, the ritual you run with whoever happens to be around because school is out.